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ruins and desolation, his object being to find a bibliopolist who might be courageous enough to undertake the publication of on epic poem in ten books.

Milton found the man he sought in the person of Samuel Simmons. Every one has heard of the terms of agreement between the poet and this publisher. The author received £5 when the contract was signed. Should 1,300 of the first edition be sold he was to receive another £5, Should the same number of the second edition be sold he was to receive the same sum, and so of a third edition; and no edition was to exceed 1,500 copies. So the sale of more than 4,000 copies was not to secure to the author more than £20. The first edition was advertised as neatly bound, and as to be sold for three shillings. Milton's agreement with Simmons was signed April 27th, 1667. On April 26th, 1669, he received his second £5, the sale of the work in two years having reached the required amount, 1,300. The second edition was not printed until 1674, from which Milton did not live to receive anything. So the entire sum which came to his hands for the Paradise Lost was £10. The second edition was sold in four years; and on printing a third edition, in 1681, Simmons gave Milton's widow £8, as the price of the copyright. From the hands of Simmons that right passed to the bookseller Brabazon Aylmer, who purchased it for £25; and in 1683 it passed from Aylmer to Jacob Tonson, at a considerably higher price. In twenty years six editions were published, and between 7,000 and 8,000 copies must have been sold. In 1688 a handsome folio edition made its appearance, under the patronage of the great Whig lawyer, Lord Somers, giving a list of more than 500 subscribers, including the names of a large number of the most eminent persons in rank and literature. These facts speak much more favourably for the public of that time than for the book trade.

Milton's English History, which had occupied so much of his thoughts at intervals, was not published until 1670. It was then much mutilated by the Licensor, and is supposed by some to have been interpolated afterwards, under the pretence of restoring the suppressed passages. In 1671 appeared the Paradise Regained, along with the Samson Agonistes. In 1673 the poet sent forth his Treatise of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what Fust Means may be used against the Growth of Popery. At that time the country was becoming daily more and more alarmed, and not without reason, in the prospect of a Popish successor to the throne, and the possible new ascendency of Romanism. Milton urges all Protestants to make the keeping out of that common enemy their common cause. In this year also Milton reprinted his early poems, with some additions and corrections, and his Tractate on Education; but in its punctuation, and in some other respects, this edition was less accurate than the former. In 1674, the last year of his life, the venerable bard published his familiar Letters in Latin; and a translation of the Declaration of the Poles in favour of John III., from the Latin, which appeared in that year, was attributed to him.

Milton suffered considerably from gout during his later years, and is said to have died of that malady. On the 8th of November, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, in his house in Bunhill Fields, the spirit of Milton passed into the world of spirits. His disease seems to have taken place without much immediate premonition, but he had for some while the presentiment that it was not distant, and his anticipations of it in the midst of his family were calm, self-possessed, and without any sign of fear. His remains were placed beside those of his father in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Toland says that his funeral was attended "by all his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar."

In his person Milton was below rather than above the middle stature. The feminine beauty

¹ Aubrey.

which distinguished him in his youth, settled into a manly symmetry of features as he grew older. His portraits show that he wore his hair parted in front, and falling in curls on his shoulders. It was of a lightish brown colour, but his eyes were grey, and retained their natural appearance even when light had passed from them. When in the vigour of his days, his air was erect and dauntless. An aged clergyman who had seen him in his later years, describes him as seated in a small chamber hung with rusty green, in an elbow chair, dressed in black; pale, but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. He used also to sit, it is said, in a grey, warm cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air.1 And so, as well in his room, he received the visits of persons of distinguished parts as well as quality. His gout could not have come from his rich living, inasmuch as his abstemiousness was one of his marked habits. He took little wine, and was very simple in his diet. In early life he injured his sight and general health by night study; subsequently, he learnt to get a fair night's rest, going to bed at nine, and rising in the summer at four, in the winter at five. Should he not be disposed to rise at that hour, some one commonly read to him. After rising, he listened to the reading of a chapter from his Hebrew Bible. He then followed his studies until midday. After a brief out-door exercise he dined, then played on the organ, or sang, or requested his wife, who had a good voice, to sing to him. He then resumed his mental occupations until six; from six to eight he received visitors; between eight and nine he took a supper of olives and some light food, smoked his pipe of tobacco, drank his glass of water, and retired to rest. One of his biograraphers says, he had "gravity in his temper, not melancholy, or not till the latter part of his life; not sour, nor morose, or ill-natured, but a certain serenity of mind, a mind not condescending to little things." 2 Aubrey, who says that he was satirical-which, no doubt, he was on the fitting occasion-further says, that "he would be very cheerful even in his gouty fits, and sing." We learn also from his youngest daughter that "her father was delightful company, the life of the conversation, and that on account of a flow of subject, and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility." There was a time when the spoils of the vanquished lay thick about him, but he touched them not. He lived a simple and honest life, and lived it to the end.

The biographers of Milton, for the most part, lament that he should have allowed his genius to be diverted as it was during some twenty years, from poetry to politics. But the politics which attracted him were not ordinary politics. The crisis had come in which it was to be determined whether England should be free or not free-the home of a manly liberty, or the puling imitator of the servile monarchies of the Continent. And there are men who are not born to live to themselves, but to their country and to humanity. Such men can take up the cross, and put even the gratification of taste in abeyance, that duty may be done. But such men are comparatively few, and Milton holds a foremost place with that few. His poetry does high henour to his genius; his services as a patriot do no less honour to his moral worth. He tells us that to have a conscience that should not be continually upbraiding him, it was indispensable that he should subordinate even his love of poetry to the love of his country and of liberty. But, to use his own illustration, in these secular strifes it was his left hand only that was put forth; his right-the higher skill and force of his nature-found its true sphere in higher things. His political writings, however, open as they may be to exception, were a powerful momentum on the side of general freedom; and one which, in common with much like it, did not die out, as is too commonly supposed, at the Restoration. Without the revolution which dates from 1640, we should hardly have seen that which dates from 1688.

Richardson's Life of Milton.

\* Richardson.